Film Critic Loses Defamation Suit Over Movie Review

The production company behind ‘Goodbye Mr. Loser’ had sued over claims of plagiarism leveled in Yang Wen’s 2015 review.

A film critic has lost a defamation case over a review and been ordered to pay 80,000 yuan ($11,800) in compensation to the film’s production company, industry news outlet China Movie Report wrote in a social media post Thursday.

A court in Beijing’s Chaoyang District ruled Tuesday that Yang Wen, better known by the pen name Wen Bai, had distorted facts about the 2015 film “Goodbye Mr. Loser” in a review from October of that year, according to the post. The movie’s production company, Mahua FunAge, had filed a lawsuit against Yang soon thereafter, demanding 2.21 million yuan in damages.

In the review, Yang claimed “Goodbye Mr. Loser” had plagiarized from the 1986 American film “Peggy Sue Got Married.” Since its initial publication, the review has been widely circulated, receiving more than 100,000 views on social app WeChat.

The production company’s lawyer had argued that there was “no plagiarism at all” in the film and accused Yang of “distorting facts and insulting” the film, according to an article published in July 2016 on ChinaCourt.org, a state-run website for judicial affairs. Meanwhile, the lawyer representing Yang claimed that his client’s comparison of the two films constituted literary criticism and should therefore be protected as freedom of expression. Read the full article here.

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